Poetry from the Poetry Editor

This piece was written for an assignment for a Creative Writing Class I took last year. We were tasked with writing a poem that had multiple parts, inspired by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s “My God, It’s Full of Stars.” I’ve always had a fascination with space, so I found this piece really interesting and fun to write.

 The first section is inspired both by what I imagine floating in space to feel like and the isolation I felt during my first year of college. Poetry has always been a way for me to process and express my emotions, so explaining my feelings of loneliness and seclusion during the height of COVID through the imagery of the infinite galaxy felt right. 

The second section is more about my personal connection with space: from my childhood wonder to my more grounded reverence of the cosmos today. The bit about sleeping under a rocketship is true; my Girls Scouts troop took an overnight trip to the Space and Rocket Center in elementary school. Needless to say, I slept on the car ride home. 

This poem, I think, will always be special to me, as it’s one of the first poems I wrote in college that I was really proud of. It also encapsulates my feelings from a very specific time in my life. So, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the poem and my commentary about it!